[HN Gopher] CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treat...
___________________________________________________________________
CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array
of diseases
Author : hassanahmad
Score : 555 points
Date : 2021-06-26 16:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| dcwardell wrote:
| Crazy genetics ideas I would like explored
|
| A modified tree that drops nuts of (nearly) pure graphite or some
| other form of nondecomposable carbon which we can easily harvest
| and sequester.
|
| Photosynthesis in humans to supplement our energy consumption.
| Shoutout to Knights of Sidonia.
|
| I understand the ethical issues surrounding the second one.
| genezeta wrote:
| You may -or may not, of course- enjoy Daniel Suarez's Change
| Agent [1]. Probably not his best but still entertaining and
| interesting.
|
| [1] https://isbn.nu/978-1-101-98466-6
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I believe the graphite nut proposal is too inefficient to work.
| A single large tree absorbs around 30 kg of CO2 per year. If it
| was able to put 10% of that into graphite nuts (which would be
| a very good efficiency), you end up with 0.8 kg of graphite
| nuts per tree per year.
|
| To match the IEAs projections for carbon capture (7.5
| gigatonnes CO2 captured per year in 2050) you would need around
| 3*10^12 trees. That's about the same as the total number of
| trees in the world. So you need to replace all of the worlds
| trees, with the corresponding destruction of many of the
| biggest ecosystems on earth.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Thats a pretty solid breakdown, but that 3x10^12 was a little
| more hope-inspiring than I was expecting. Seems like a
| workable part of a larger multi-pronged solution if you
| streamlined the plants metabolism (?). Then again I dont know
| what in the h*ll Im talking about so theres that...
| kaba0 wrote:
| > A modified tree that drops nuts of (nearly) pure
|
| Well, we sort of have that in the form of specifically
| engineering bacteria to create some drugs, notably insulin.
| Though I'm sure graphene require additional biological
| structure and that is a much harder problem them
| adding/removing a few genes.
| deegles wrote:
| How about a fast growing bamboo variant that is denser than
| water, so that it can be grown and then dumped into the deep
| ocean to sequester carbon.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| As someone who knows next to nothing about genetics, it's
| interesting to me that we haven't engineered a tree that grows
| faster than a hybrid poplar but thicker than a oak or sequoia
| (for carbon sequestration, and lumber).
|
| An added benefit would be if the wood after harvested lasted
| longer than a cedar.
|
| I'm guessing the reason this isn't possible is more due to the
| fact that it's just not financially worth the investment than
| it being too difficult.
|
| But I'd love to hear from someone who knows more about this
| stuff.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Kudos on this comment. Had never considered the Bosch process
| (using hydrogen) for sequestering CO2 into graphite until
| reading this.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| ... or turning people into monadic supermen.
| janikvonrotz wrote:
| Not reading the entire article - I believe this is going the
| wrong way...
| victor106 wrote:
| This is just mind blowing.
|
| What are some good investment opportunities if you think this is
| going to revolutionize the world in the next 30-50 years?
| archon810 wrote:
| From another comment here, Verve?
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/VERV
|
| Any more suggestions?
| DantesKite wrote:
| A lot of times you hear about these breakthroughs in medical
| papers or in mice, but this really feels different.
|
| Like an actual breakthrough with an actual cure for a specific
| disease. It's remarkable.
|
| Here's to more cures.
|
| God bless.
| bawana wrote:
| So the religious right decided that we do not own our bodies, god
| does. Just as software companies issue a EULA, all children born
| since 2032 are required to have their parents sign a EULA.
| Genetic modification is strictly prohibited and punishable by
| reduction of the government stipend that everyone receives in
| fedcoin every month. Underground genetic modification labs are
| run by organized crime but unfortunately those using these labs
| also get an unplanned genetic modification in addition to the one
| they want. They are made dependent on a drug that only those labs
| can provide, for a price. In addition, there are monthly
| vaccination programs for citizens to protect them against genetic
| terrorists, carriers of lethal protoviruses who are engineered to
| carry and disseminate Covid derivatives that target HLA SUBTYPES
| common in Northern European and South American genotypes.
|
| Yes genetic modification is another wonderful technology that
| humans will weaponize....like atomic energy, like the internet...
| calrueb wrote:
| The fact that we can apply these sort of therapies to an adult
| human who consists of millions upon millions of cells blows my
| mind. Having the ability to fix our "buggy" genetic code while we
| are alive is amazing.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Monkey patching in production.
| correcthorse123 wrote:
| I think targetting tbe liver is far easier than most other
| tissues though, unfortunately.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Gotta start somewhere...
| hhjinks wrote:
| You're off by a _couple_ orders of magnitude. There are
| trillions of cells in a human body.
| hoseja wrote:
| 10^6 * 10^6 = 10^12
| zz865 wrote:
| Would CRISPR be the technology people would use to modify a bat
| virus to make it human transmissable? This stuff should stay in
| its box.
| baybal2 wrote:
| It will not stay in the box.
|
| The allure of armies of supersoldiers without sense of
| emotions, conscience, and remorse is irresistible for
| dictators. I bet Chinese, or Russian militaries are already
| working on that.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Humans still have to be fed. Killer robots dont
| koeng wrote:
| They could also use normal editing with PCR since the genomes
| are small. Also CRISPRs are in tons of organisms (I've
| amplified it from yogurt), so the box is already out there.
| stuntkite wrote:
| You would not need CRISPR to do that. If something like that
| ever occurred they would probably use other methods that have
| been very well studied for much longer and are considerably
| easier to apply. Including just taking blood samples from bats
| (or pangolins or whatever) and archiving a great compelling
| virus and culturing it in a lab. If you wanna add CRISPR into
| the mix you could also make a virus like that make someone grow
| some horns and get hiccups that sound like a kazoo though.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Knives can kill and save people. Almost anything can be used
| for bad purposes in the wrong hands.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Not that I agree we should bury our heads in the sand like
| luddites, but to be fair to OP, knives can only hurt or help
| in a tiny human radius. It's hard to make an extinction-level
| weapon (or extension level accident) out of them.
|
| Being able to edit genes at will is a different story.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Viruses are an extinction-level weapon. CRISPR? Not so
| much. (And neither are likely to result in an extinction-
| level accident; you'd have to deliberately deploy potent
| bioweapons in multiple places to extinct us.)
| [deleted]
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Yes but the CRISPR engine is passed on to offspring which
| raises massive ethical questions.
|
| As I understand it (and hopefully I'm not way off base
| here) there is a technique that creates a "gene drive"
| which is kinda like an SDK that is inserted into the
| patients genome which improves the efficacy of CRISPR.
|
| This code finds its way into the gametes which is then
| passed on to children. The children did not ask for this
| SDK, but now they have it and it potentially becomes
| immortal in human DNA.
|
| On the one hand, cool: the SDK is there and possibly
| makes it even easier to alter DNA>
|
| On the other hand, holy shit: there's a ticking timebomb
| in the populations DNA now.
|
| It's called CRISPR-cas9:
|
| https://wyss.harvard.edu/media-post/crispr-cas9-gene-
| drives/
|
| https://scicomm2020.wordpress.com/2020/02/24/controversia
| l-g...
| penneyd wrote:
| Not if you're 65 it doesn't...
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Excellent point!
| ben_w wrote:
| The really great thing about us knowing how to read and
| edit genes now, is that if that happened we would notice
| and could switch it off. The stuff we want to wipe out
| using gene drives -- e.g. Malaria -- can't.
|
| There are things to worry about with cheap gene
| engineering, but that particular possibility won't affect
| us.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Turning medical science from a technical problem into an ethical
| one would be a massive epoch boundary for humanity, I'd say. More
| so than the Internet.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| So this is editing liver cells, which I read somewhere is the
| easiest to do, since the liver absorbs foreign elements from the
| bloodstream.
|
| The success of this should mean that many genetic liver
| conditions can soon be treated this way.
|
| For other organs, I expect a longer wait.
| codeulike wrote:
| The brain is particularly hard due to blood/brain barrier,
| crispr is too big a molecule to go through. So might need
| injections into cerebral spinal fluid for that
| wgolsen wrote:
| The lung epithelium has also recently been transfected in
| humans (see Translate Bio cf drug; this and similar vehicles
| can deliver editing tools)
| jonplackett wrote:
| Wonder how long it will be until this is used to enhance rather
| than just to cure.
|
| Eg selective fast twitch / slow twitch muscle fibres.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Probably already happening
| jonplackett wrote:
| Presumably it would be damn hard to detect if it was!
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Usain Bolt would be my number 1 candidate. His meteoric
| rise lines up perfectly date wise with the emergence of
| this technology and it is well documented that athletes
| have been using themselves as guinea pigs for various pre-
| commercial drugs due to the ability to avoid positive
| tests.
| jz_ wrote:
| Something like this? https://www.studyfinds.org/superhero-
| vaccine-olympic-dna-eua...
| jonplackett wrote:
| Haha. What could possibly go wrong?
| ausbah wrote:
| >Doctors infused billions of microscopic structures known as
| nanoparticles carrying genetic instructions for the CRISPR gene-
| editor into four patients in London and two in New Zealand. The
| nanoparticles were absorbed by their livers, where they unleashed
| armies of CRISPR gene-editors. The CRISPR editor honed in on the
| target gene in the liver and sliced it, disabling production of
| the destructive protein.
|
| this is one of the coolest paragraphs I've read in a while. if
| it's accurate, serves as a great reminder that we're in the
| future as we speak
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| 100%, the mRNA vaccines fall into this future category too.
| Being able to use RNA to direct cells to do what we need is
| mind blowing.
| piyushpr134 wrote:
| A new world is beaconing upon us. Much like computers in 70s.
| We are in the real early phases of this technology and this
| would most probably make the world completely different from
| what it is now.
|
| Mind you, this is just the beginning. First we would have all
| kinds of diseases being cured using this, 1. It would change
| the whole medical diagnostics industry to correctly diagnose
| the pathogen, 2. Then destroy the pathogen using DNA cutting
| 3. It would cure cancers of many kind by enabling the T-cells
| to fight the cancer cells effectively
|
| Then we would start with reprogramming cells to do what we
| want. For instance, we can cure baldness, completely
| regenerate cardiac cells after heart attack.
|
| However, it would not stop at this. We would have bio-
| machines which can capture carbon dioxide, generate
| medicines, make clothes/cotton and food. We would have bio
| solar cells. We would bio light bulbs which ingest light
| during the day and glow at night. We would have artificial
| meat produced using this technology. We would have
| carbohydrates produced using this. Plastic and sewage eating
| bacteria would be a reality soon.
|
| Next 30-40 years is going to be biotechnology as last 30-40
| were computing.
| thejackgoode wrote:
| Blowing the other horn, as an engineer I can imagine sorts
| of mistakes that can be made while editing DNA. We don't
| fully understand life yet, but already cutting it in
| pieces, for a good purpose as it may be
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| True, I've read stories where researchers have done
| analysis of the DNA after the use of CRISPR and found
| that parts other than the target had been affected.
|
| But like all decisions, you weigh the good vs the bad and
| you make a decision. In many cases it will be the best
| choice by far. Additionally, the more we use it the more
| we will understand the down side and we can plan for it.
|
| Yup, it has a down side but we'll be able to balance the
| good and bad parts. Techies love to focus on the good of
| technology but I think it's good to point out the bad as
| loud as possible so we can plan for it. The fact is that
| the genie is out of the bottle and it won't go back in.
| So CRISP is part of our future.
| piyushpr134 wrote:
| CRISPR is highly targetted AFAIK and read. Unintended
| effects will actually kill it or slow it down.
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| I am bullish on the tech, but don't forget about how swords
| have two edges...there are going to be some crazy new
| exploits in our biology this technology will be able to
| take advantage of. Slipping genetic information past immune
| sentinels is going to have some crazy downstream risks we
| are just beginning to fathom.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I watched a pretty good PBS-NOVA special on CRISPR
| recently that covered this.
|
| It seems like the scientists interviewed (some of them
| leaders in CRISPR) were of the opinion that we should
| stay the hell away from editing the human germ line (not
| sure if I used the right term, but basically stuff that
| would be passed to offspring).
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| I'm not even just talking about CRISPR. mRNA-LNP is like
| a flash drive that bypasses anti-virus software. The
| opportunities are...dramatic.
| piyushpr134 wrote:
| The problem is that cat is out of the bag. There will be
| much more potentially dangerous stuff which will come out
| in future. There is no stopping it....like it or not
| mrtksn wrote:
| Out of the sudden, the sci-fi movies where the E.T.'s look
| like insects and their gadgets look biological are much
| more realistic.
|
| Why would you manufacture anything if you can grow it?
| This'll probably remove great deal of the maintenance too.
| skybrian wrote:
| Note that the liver is perhaps the easiest target since it
| filters the blood.
|
| See:
| https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/20/cr...
| trhway wrote:
| I expected we would be doing this using viruses, and there
| are viruses targeting various tissues/organs. The nanites
| though are just really Star Trek cool.
| siver_john wrote:
| While nanoparticles could correspond to viral like
| carriers. The reason you probably wouldn't want to naively
| use viral particles is because any viral particle that
| would likely attack the body naturally would also trigger
| the immune system. That would decrease the efficacy and
| could actually increase the likelihood of side effects.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing
|
| Delivery of Cas9, sgRNA, and associated complexes into
| cells can occur via viral and non-viral systems.
| Electroporation of DNA, RNA, or ribonucleocomplexes is a
| common technique, though it can result in harmful effects
| on the target cells.[43] Chemical transfection techniques
| utilizing lipids and peptides have also been used to
| introduce sgRNAs in complex with Cas9 into cells.[44][45]
| Types of cells that are more difficult to transfect (e.g.
| stem cells, neurons, and hematopoietic cells) require
| more efficient delivery systems, such as those based on
| lentivirus (LVs), adenovirus (AdV), and adeno-associated
| virus (AAV).[46][47][48]
| DoctorNick wrote:
| The record breaking temperatures that I'm suffering in the PNW
| right now serves as a grim reminder that we won't have much of
| a future, even with all this cool tech.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Everyone will move to Canada and similar places. Only the
| poor will be left behind to die in the heat and most of the
| world won't care and will feel like "good riddance."
|
| Edit:
|
| In case anyone thinks this is just snark, no. I'm in the PNW
| and I grew up in Georgia and lived in California for a lot of
| years, including the High Desert where I was south of Death
| Valley and 115 in July was not unusual. I'm dirt poor and
| have been for years. I spent years homeless.
|
| The heat wave per se is not a big deal to me. But it's late
| in the month and I'm nearly broke.
|
| If the heat kills me, it will be because I'm out of funds,
| not because 107 is a big damn deal per se. The world has
| spent a lot of years making it clear to me that it doesn't
| care about my welfare at all and no amount of virtue, hard
| work, yadda is ever enough to adequately remedy my problems.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| I think you are correct. Unchecked climate change will send
| the wealthy and middle classes North. If History is any
| indicator, they will close the borders of their regions as
| tightly as possible and commit a pitance to "humanitarian
| aid" leaving the poor piling up in refugee camps on their
| borders.
|
| We have the examples of the U.S. border, Australia's camps
| on Naru, the various permeant refugee camps spread across
| the Eastern Mediterranean and many more as examples.
|
| As the situation becomes more intense, migrants will become
| more desperate and bold. The reaction from the wealthy
| enclaves will become more and more repressive. (Who
| themselves will be seeing a diminished standard of living).
|
| In my opinion, the only thing that could spare us this
| future is a global commitment to universal rights and more
| equal resource distribution. But this would require
| countries like the United States to write rights of non-
| citizens deeply into their constitutions. And that is
| likely unattainable at this time.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Animals are already migrating to more northerly climes as
| recent articles on Svalbard attest.* What prevents people
| from doing the same is mostly international borders,
| politics and money.
|
| Before we had international borders, plenty of humans
| lived migratory lives as well.
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27479739
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Absolutely. Even recorded history is full of migrations
| of large groups of people (anglo-saxons, repeated
| migrations out of the Asian steppe, mass migrations of
| the Native Americans after European arrival, etc). If we
| could reach high enough state of moral development we
| might even come to see migration as a human right. Though
| I believe impending material poverty will make that
| unlikely.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| In spite of my own personal challenges, I'm actually more
| hopeful than many people seem to be. (Edit: at least for
| humanity. Not necessarily for myself.)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732
| civilized wrote:
| There are populated areas whose livability is threatened by
| climate change. These are in very poor, low-latitude regions
| like Northern India. Sorry to burst your bubble, but PNWers
| will have the privilege of surviving and thriving with
| relatively minimal issue.
|
| As always, the consequences of the environmental sins of the
| global wealthy, like you and me and most HNers, will be borne
| by the global poor in other places. We are all responsible
| for what they will endure in the coming decades.
|
| Eco-despair is, as always, a facile psychological defense
| mechanism and a luxury of the most privileged. We are
| responsible for the problem, and we also have the most power
| to solve it. We need to act accordingly. Starting with a
| calm, rational, comprehensive reckoning of our options,
| including nuclear (which has made France the low-carbon
| leader of the developed world).
|
| Instead of letting guilt paralyze us with delusional
| fantasies of a well-deserved universal doom, we should use
| our privilege to advance no-carbon energy and carbon capture
| to hopefully protect the less fortunate people whose futures
| truly are threatened.
| DoctorNick wrote:
| I don't know if you've noticed, but the political process
| is completely fucking broken. Good fucking luck getting any
| of that passed in any meaningful form.
| cbozeman wrote:
| You're not going to have to worry about that.
|
| Once rich people are inconvenienced, the problem will be
| taken seriously.
|
| Case in point, there was no "opioid crisis" in America
| until some rich Senator's daughter overdosed on heroin.
| Then all of a sudden it's a crisis.
| civilized wrote:
| Yes, life is hard.
|
| Yes, we have to live through it anyway.
|
| Just like everyone else who lived before us.
| piyushpr134 wrote:
| Northern India has always been this hot. I remember in 90s
| and early 2000s and god it was so freaking hot in May and
| June. There is this thing called loo in India (not the
| toilet) but this is warm westerly winds which start in the
| afternoons. It sucks your soul (and hydration and sodium
| out) and leaves you fully dehydrated. Many people die of
| that heat stroke caused by this loo.
|
| But then monsoon comes in July and it is hot and sweaty!
| People don't die anymore of heat stroke but it is
| uncomfortable like anything. Once we reach september, we
| are back to normal and it is festival time! This continues
| till Novemeber when more festivals come like diwali,
| christmas etc along with wedding season (yes we have
| those).
|
| Then with a zip in the air, Cold season starts and soon it
| is freaking cold in Dec and Jan. Like really chilly winds
| but no snow. We have our rajai (quilts) which save us. Poor
| people on streets die again but rich ones have their rajai,
| sweaters, tea and warm bonfires and heaters. Then comes feb
| and it is really beautiful again. Flower bloom. And it is
| festival time again. April comes which tells us that we are
| in for a May & June again. :)
| ben_w wrote:
| From the maps I've seen, Northern India itself is only a
| bit warmer than it used to be; However, if I understand
| correctly, the problem is the effect on the Himalayas and
| the subsequent consequences to the Northern India water
| supply: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/water/crisis-
| in-the-hima...
| awestroke wrote:
| I'm not sure your calm and comprehensive reckoning of your
| options will be comprehensive enough to have any effect on
| where we as a species are heading.
|
| Because I don't shy away from facts, I am paralyzed? I
| disagree. If anything, I am less paralyzed than people who
| refuse to see where this path leads. I vote for green
| policies and try to inform others, even when I know there
| is no hope.
| civilized wrote:
| Nah, you don't know the technology well enough to say if
| there is no hope. This is just the fashionable moralistic
| eco-despair of the privileged: "we are doomed because we
| deserve it." No, we're not doomed, maybe some poor people
| of the global South are because of what we do, but we're
| not.
| awestroke wrote:
| The science agrees with me. What is this "the technology"
| that you refer to? Carbon capture?
| civilized wrote:
| "The" science, whatever that is supposed to be, doesn't
| say we are all doomed.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| So what then? We should throw our hands in the air and give
| up? Take the good news as it comes.
| cj wrote:
| It's not impossible to speculate the possibility that in
| 50-100 years, climate change could be reversed through a
| CRISPR-like technology (e.g. something that can be released
| and replicate in the environment, thereby changing it).
|
| Or at the very least, I can see a future where gene editing
| could relieve your suffering from heat by raising the
| threshold your body can tolerate :)
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| You want something that replicates in the environment and
| removes carbon? We have those. They're called "plants."
| nr2x wrote:
| Even if we reforested every possible area, the current
| rate of carbon outlay exceeds capacity to absorb.
|
| Well explained in the Economist video:
| https://youtu.be/EXkbdELr4EQ
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Does this include ocean farming based carbon capture?
| That sounded like a pretty positive route in terms of
| land use limitations when I heard about it.
| chr1 wrote:
| If we could convert Sahara back into a savannah or farms,
| the amount of carbon required for the new soil and plants
| would exceed the amount of extra carbon we have added to
| the atmosphere so far. And there are many viable routes
| to do that. E.g. building large number of ocean thermal
| energy conversion plants [1] to reduce temperature of the
| north hemisphere, recreating conditions that have caused
| green Sahara in the past. There are numerous
| possibilities to use engineering to revert adverse
| effects of climate change, and to actually improve the
| climate. The only scenario when we are doomed, is if
| population declines significantly so that we get runaway
| effect from carbon we have already produced melting
| permafrost, and not have large enough economy to use
| geoengineering on a large enough scale.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_co
| nversio...
| nr2x wrote:
| So there's one minor problem with the Sahara...
| nobodyknowsyoda wrote:
| > They're called "plants."
|
| Incidentally, CRISPR + plants is one of the most
| promising solutions to climate change: https://www.ted.co
| m/talks/joanne_chory_how_supercharged_plan...
| p1mrx wrote:
| If food crops are engineered to grow big, carbon
| sequestering roots, how will we determine whether the
| quality and safety of the food is unaffected?
| nitrogen wrote:
| Mass spectrometry and similar analysis methods to look
| for unexpected proteins in the food parts, followed by
| feeding the food parts to animals and seeing what
| happens.
| wavegeek wrote:
| Thank you for your patronizing response to the above
| poster.
|
| The problem is to do with things called "numbers".
|
| 1. There is no spare land to devote to CC. You could do
| this only at the cost of poor people's food supply.
|
| 2. The rate at which plants remove CO2 from the air is
| very low. Far too low to solve the problem.
| ben_w wrote:
| 1. Can be solved with phytoplankton, and separately also
| by more land-area-efficient farming e.g. greenhouses, 2.
| Can be improved with genetic engineering.
|
| Do the right generic engineering and you even get the oil
| feedstocks you need for plastics. You could even put the
| algae in a tube on a rooftop as an alternative to PV, if
| you could resolve the issue of unwanted other
| phytoplankton getting in and gumming it up.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| A lot of agricultural land is wasted growing crops to
| feed to animals. If we were to lower meat consumption,
| agriculture land could be freed for other uses without
| taking away poor people's food supply.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Anytime I see a TED talk, I just automatically assume the
| technology is at best overhyped and at worst completely
| fraudulent.
| PixelOfDeath wrote:
| Looking at the world right now, I hope for the best with
| that gene therapy against sociopathic billionaires.
| coliveira wrote:
| Too bad for the millions of people who will die because of
| the changes during these 50 years...
| nr2x wrote:
| At current rates of carbon outlay, there won't be much of a
| world left to save in 100 years.
| kortilla wrote:
| That statement isn't backed by science
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Not unless we all work our asses off! Engineers can do
| anything :^)
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| ... except politics, engineers are usually not very good
| at politics, and climate change is, in large part, a
| political problem.
| dantheman wrote:
| It's a technology problem unless you want condemn most of
| the world to an incredibly low standard of living.
| ben_w wrote:
| Yes, but what we can do is try to invent things which are
| better then the status quo in terms of _both_ money _and_
| the environment -- if people use those inventions for
| purely selfish reasons, they're still helping the world.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| again, I love me some doom trolling but only if it helps
| motivate work, and if software engineers can build
| platforms that undermine democracy I gotta believe its at
| least possible they can undermine bad politics too
| nitrogen wrote:
| Stop with the doom trolling and get busy inventing solutions.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| This++
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Heck yeah, this why I keep coming back the HN community.
| But if you gotta get that doom trolling out too its all
| good as long as it reminds us all how hard we gotta keep
| workin :^)
| imvetri wrote:
| In hackerrank I was expecting post like
|
| "Show:HN I injected chameleon DNA to my dog"
| stavros wrote:
| Without doom trolling nobody will vote for the people who
| want to implement the costly solutions.
| nitrogen wrote:
| There's a curve to most people's response to levels of
| advocacy. The response rises with advocacy to a point,
| but then past a certain point, the response drops
| precipitously. When the advocacy turns into over-the-top
| vehemence, people tend to stop responding and may even
| respond negatively (i.e. rebel and go full anti-
| whatever).
|
| As an example of a similar drastic falloff at the top of
| a response curve, I recall reading that people who live
| right next to a dam report near zero concern about the
| dam collapsing, but as you go further away people are
| very concerned, then somewhat concerned, than only little
| concerned.
|
| So anyway, we need more carrots, fewer sticks.
| stavros wrote:
| Hmm, that's interesting about the dam, though I wonder
| whether only the people who wouldn't fear a dam collapse
| would live next to one.
| TOMDM wrote:
| Or if living closer to a dam means you are more likely to
| be better informed as to the construction and safety
| margins and thus less likely to think catastrophic
| failure is likely.
| lagadu wrote:
| We have solutions, there's an entire field with solutions,
| it's called climate engineering[0]. The problem is that
| currently it's not politically supported because the
| thought of humans actively editing the climate to suit our
| needs makes the wildly vast majority of environmentalists
| start foaming at the mouth and, ironically, doom trolling
| any solutions because the current thought paradigm is "we
| have to interfere less", ignoring that it's way too late
| for that. Also because with climate engineering there's
| very little need to reduce emissions, which again makes
| current environmentalists get aneurysms.
|
| In other words, nowadays climate change is no longer an
| engineering problem, only a political one.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
| _djo_ wrote:
| That's a simplistic take and unfair to those who are
| cautious about it.
|
| Most opposition to climate engineering is based on the
| risks of introducing more instability to a complex system
| we already don't completely understand. For instance
| experiments to fertilize oceans with iron to supposedly
| stimulate phytoplankton production had all kinds of
| unexpected side effects and failed to produce the hoped-
| for outcome.
|
| We will certainly be forced into climate engineering
| solutions of some sort, as emission reductions alone are
| no longer sufficient to solve the problem even if we drop
| to net zero immediately, but they should be treated with
| caution and skepticism because of the inherent risk
| involved.
|
| It also varies by the type of engineering. CO2
| sequestration is widely accepted and desired because of
| its low risk, but it's difficult and expensive.
| iaml wrote:
| Technical solutions are often ineffective when faced with
| obstacles of politics or cutting corners to make money.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| Unfortunately I think technical solutions are the only
| thing that will save us. Most countries would rather
| invade others then give up their standard of living.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| Here's my controversial opinion - the best individual
| solution is to do less stuff. To me, it doesn't make sense
| that a problem caused by over-zealous production will be
| solved by over-zealous production. We can't really expect
| making more stuff to solve our problems caused by making
| too much stuff. The new stuff we make should be targeted at
| increasing the efficiency of production, but, while
| helpful, I can't help but view that innovation as only part
| of a solution. Another part of the solution is individuals
| trying to change the functions of corporations, and the
| only way I can think to do that is by doing and demanding
| less overall. Still, though, individual change feels like
| it's meaningless at this point. The building I live in is
| run on solar, and climate awareness has been baked into my
| school curriculums since elementary school, but if Exxon
| Mobil doesn't sort its shit out, I don't think my house is
| going to do much.
|
| The rest of the solution, and this is controversial opinion
| number two, is that we need to reorient the purpose of
| corporations, and the economy as whole, from profit to
| humanity. Only 20 companies produced 35% of GHG emissions,
| and 100 produced 70%[0]. This isn't an individual issue,
| and it won't be fixed by individual solutions.
| Corporations, driven by innovation as an extension of
| profit, caused this problem. If we _just_ request more
| innovation, I feel like we 're going to be fucked.
|
| I agree that climate despair is unhelpful, but so is the
| "let's let innovation sort it out" attitude - we need real
| structural change that innovation within capitalism can't
| provide. I'd suggest Marxism, but I doubt that's something
| most people want to hear.
|
| 0: https://climateaccountability.org/pdf/CAI%20PressRelease
| %20D...
| hoseja wrote:
| By doing less stuff you're ultimately decreasing your
| evolutionary fitness, benefiting those who don't have
| such qualms.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| I'm also asexual. I'm well past worrying about that, even
| if I did follow your logic there.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kaminar wrote:
| Wasn't there a recent HN article about another genetic splicer
| that's 1000x faster than CRISPR?
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Is this a one-time treatment? Does it remove all of the
| offending genetic material, and then when those cells divide
| they are cured? Or does it require ongoing treatment?
| drran wrote:
| Patient will need to do it once per 1,5-2 years.
|
| See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoczYXJeMY4 .
| rolleiflex wrote:
| It's editing the genes of the cells of the liver, so
| presumably when those liver cells divide and multiply, the
| change would also be copied along as well.
|
| What isn't clear to me is that if this is targeted at the
| liver cells in particular, or splicing it for every cell in
| the body. In other words, this could be a germline mutation
| (passed to children) or it could be a somatic mutation (no
| change to future children), it depends on how targeted the
| treatment was.
| wgolsen wrote:
| When administered IV, most LNPs of this type are highly
| selective for hepatocytes. This edit cannot be passed on as
| no germ cells will be transfected.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Even if it is not specific, I would believe gametes are not
| affected/can be easily excludes due to the blood-testis
| barrier.
| puchatek wrote:
| If eating GMOs has you scared, this should be absolutely
| terrifying
| esperent wrote:
| So if I'm fine with GMO food (and medicine), by extension
| I'll fine with this.
|
| ... Or is that a logical fallacy?
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| The inverse of a conditional is not logically equivalent.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The statement was "If A, then B". You're not A, so it
| doesn't apply. The statement doesn't say anything about the
| "Not A" case.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah I bet the dude in the article is scared shitless about
| nanoparticles now that he's not gonna die.
| alex_sf wrote:
| All crops are GMO. The only difference is how fast they were
| modified.
| karottenreibe wrote:
| Are you saying that's not a significant difference? It
| seems to me.
| laburn wrote:
| It seems to you what?
| hoseja wrote:
| Probably that letting the slow-GMO survive in a natural
| environment for hundreds of years does wonders for
| ironing out the really bad bugs.
|
| I'm not anti-GMO but i've been more wary ever since I
| realized it will inevitably be used to make better
| citizens (and not by making them better humans).
| petre wrote:
| It depends. There's a number of dog breeds with known
| genetical issues.
|
| GE is a double edged sword just like nuclear energy. With
| great power comes great responsability.
| hoseja wrote:
| Those are mostly innovations of the latest century or so,
| bred "scientifically", regulated by dog breed foundations
| and chasing dog-show metrics.
| alex_sf wrote:
| Not really any more alarming to me than the initial
| domestication I guess. Manipulating the world around us
| is kinda our whole deal as a species.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| This is false. The distance between selective breeding and
| GMO is horizontal vs vertical gene transfer.
| null_object wrote:
| > All crops are GMO. The only difference is how fast they
| were modified.
|
| This is often said in defense of GMO, but surely cross-
| breeding and hybridization - a farmer or gardener
| attempting to combine the _entire_ genetic entity of one
| plant with another one (which must therefore be naturally
| compatible), to increase the potential utility of the
| result - is totally different to inserting a single gene
| from a totally arbitrary source (which can therefore be a
| completely separate life-form)?
| drran wrote:
| If I make a sandwich (wheat genes + chicken genes + cow
| genes + yeast genes) and cover it with honey (insect
| genes), what will happen to me when I will eat it?
| _0ffh wrote:
| And then there's Atomic Gardening which has been done for
| ages and does not officially count as producing GMOs,
| IIRC.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| Wikipedia says that they first used viruses as delivery agents;
| now it's nanoparticles, aparently to avoid destruction by the
| immune system. Also interesting that CRISPR gene editing was also
| the subject of a patent war. Amazing stuff... (also it took them
| less than a year to adopt the nanoparticle trick to CRISPR gene
| editing. Things are moving fast)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing
|
| https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/11/coated-nanopa...
| Alkhwarizmi wrote:
| The patent war is already a settled matter for the reasonable
| folks amongst us, nevertheless there are people among us who
| still believe that the criminals at Harvard have any stake in
| this patent!
| myko wrote:
| I'm very hopeful that someday these techniques will cure diseases
| like Huntington's
| okareaman wrote:
| _We have tried every imaginable remedy. In some instances there
| has been brief recovery, followed always by a still worse
| relapse. Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there
| is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic.
| Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn 't done so yet._
| -- Alcoholics Anonymous Chapter 3, More About Alcoholism
|
| I may soon be able to drink again after having my genes edited,
| but I'm not sure I would do it
| bottled_poe wrote:
| The word "always" in this passage doesn't sound very
| scientific. Makes me wonder if the rest of the content has the
| same tone.
| okareaman wrote:
| Yes it does have this tone. It's not science. It was written
| in 1935 by Bill Wilson, a former stock market speculator and
| salesman. It's designed to be inspirational, as in, you may
| think you are a hopeless drunk, but I have a solution for you
| right here in this book. Give it a try.
|
| Edit: Something not often discussed is that Bill Wilson was
| hoping to make money from this book, being dead broke in the
| middle of the Great Depression. The first people he helped
| sober up convinced him that he had to give it away freely.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Can anyone explain how this survives being in the blood stream
| and then how it actually gets into the nucleus of the cell?
| xwdv wrote:
| What are the limits of gene editing?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| We're constrained by the subset of physics that can be
| implemented by proteins. Plus, the genetic code can't be too
| big, or it won't fit, but I doubt we'll ever hit that limit
| (provided we don't go the software route and build a giant
| tower of massive abstractions that gets copied everywhere).
| hoseja wrote:
| Proteins and things built by proteins. Teeth aren't very
| protein-y.
| xwdv wrote:
| Why can't we hardwire genes to continue growing teeth?
| stuntkite wrote:
| I don't think there are any aside from money, time, and
| experience. If you'd like to give yourself glowing purple eyes,
| huge muscles, and make it so you fart clouds of illegal street
| drugs you can but it's much more difficult and messy than
| deleting 'node_modules', rebuilding, and doing a `git push
| --force` into prod at 5PM on a Friday before you take a long
| weekend.
| amelius wrote:
| Before getting too excited, let's not forget the stories where
| gene therapy went horribly wrong.
|
| https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-death-of-je...
|
| > Doudna expressed similar concerns about CRISPR.
|
| > "I hope that we don't get ahead of ourselves with this
| technology. As exciting as it is, I really would like to see .
| . . people take a very measured and responsible path forward,
| where there's careful vetting along the way," she said. "Of
| course, the challenge is that patients are waiting, so you
| don't want to delay unduly. But you also want to be safe."
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| > "We were all very much aware of what happened there and
| what a tragedy that was," she said in a recent interview.
| "That made the whole field of gene therapy go away, mostly,
| for at least a decade.
|
| Damn this sucks to read. To think of how much progress we
| might have made in a promising field if we could just get
| over one person dying. Yes it's awful, and we shouldn't be
| flippant, but we're talking about work to help _humanity as a
| whole_. This isn't the same as saying "the means justify the
| ends." This is just saying, "Shit, we fucked up there, let's
| not do that again, but let's keep learning." I don't know how
| you ever advance without making mistakes.
| nojokes wrote:
| Well, in some situations we are doing this. For example
| even when some vaccines happen to kill some small number of
| people, it has been argued that in current situation it is
| still net positive.
| xf1cf wrote:
| A better question might be what are the ethical limits of gene
| editing. How long until we stumble over eugenics but with extra
| steps? It seems to me at least to be the natural conclusion of
| advanced gene editing. Law of unintended consequences and all
| that.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Could we hack our genes to need less oxygen and eat less?
|
| That could be useful in the future.
| imvetri wrote:
| Want to try chameleon color changing dna to pomerian dog
| palijer wrote:
| I feel like I missed something, and now everywhere I look we have
| headlines like this.
|
| What's wrong with "CRISPR gene editing shown to cure
| Transthyretin amyloidosis in patient study"
|
| Maybe I'm now one of the old people who doesn't understand new
| usage of language. But I understand that usage dictates grammar
| rules, but I feel I missed something.
| MrDresden wrote:
| I believe the metaphore of the inverted pyramid used in
| journalism plays a part here.
|
| edit: Strike that, hadn't realized that the article title and
| the HN link differed so much.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| NPR isn't a research paper, or a researcher focused website.
| eat_veggies wrote:
| The paper linked in the article is titled "CRISPR-Cas9 In Vivo
| Gene Editing for Transthyretin Amyloidosis." That's close
| enough to your proposed title. If what you're looking for is a
| technical research paper meant for people intimately familiar
| with the field, then that's a great title.
|
| But it's a terrible title for an article meant for laypeople
| like us. The words "transthyretin amyloidosis" are utterly
| meaningless to me and most HN/NPR readers, but "He Inherited A
| Devastating Disease" tells me what kind of disease it is
| (devastating, heritable) and why CRISPR gene editing might be a
| big deal.
|
| It also helps clue me into the contents of the article. Because
| it is as much a summary of a key research result, as it is a
| profile of Patrick Doherty, a man affected by the disease.
| That's entirely missing from your title.
|
| None of this is new. "Write for your audience" is as old as
| writing itself.
| phreack wrote:
| I know what you mean. These headlines read less like titles and
| more like lyrics in a song ("He was a skater boy. She said see
| you later boy."). It feels a bit condescending, as if it was
| aiming at children. I'd much prefer a title with a "person with
| thing does action" style.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think it's just an oddity of newspapers. Even before it was
| called "going viral", they've been a bit like that.
| boublepop wrote:
| > What's wrong with "CRISPR gene editing shown to cure
| Transthyretin amyloidosis in patient study"
|
| I understand your asking a rhetorical question but in the
| interest of having a discussion about this I'll try to give you
| an answer. Imagine a title like "Xonuicfixs shown in
| zenocttkike to cure Xclatngt"
|
| Reading that you might thing "wrf are they talking about?" But
| imagine I just change the title to be more like:
|
| "A breakthrough in Xonuicfixs shows promise as a cure for a
| range of decided."
|
| Have I lowered the information content of the title? Yes,
| certainly. However I have also made it very apparent to you an
| others who don't know the subject matter why this is a
| worthwhile achievement, and this might therefore just become
| the first article that you read and learn about Xonuicfixs.
|
| And really shouldn't that be the job of a title? To convey to
| potential readers why the content might be with their time. And
| I would note that this is entirely different from clickbait
| which tires to lure you into content with no information about
| what the content is.
| wgolsen wrote:
| In my opinion, and it seems in the NPR editor's opinion, the
| most exciting angle to this story isn't the cure of one
| relatively rare disease (TAA), but rather the seemingly
| imminent cure of many/most inherited diseases which affect
| cells of the liver. Indeed, we can even make edits that confer
| protective benefits to people at risk for diseases due to
| mutations OR lifestyle (see a similar approach by Verve
| Therapeutics). This is a big story which deserves the attention
| grabbing headline.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Off topic: are there any central repositories tracking gene
| therapy progress for various genetic conditions, with a similar
| UX to Moderna's mRNA pipeline tracker?
|
| https://www.modernatx.com/pipeline
| t3po7re5 wrote:
| All FDA trials are listed here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/, I
| believe you can search by gene. It's not as nice as the moderna
| pipeline though.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Thanks for that!
| iandanforth wrote:
| Please do familial hypercholesterolemia soon! I know it would be
| harder but getting started on targeting specific mutations could
| be fruitful.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3681164/
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I want the CRISPR research that focuses on CIP accelerated. I
| have a minor chronic pain issue that will get worse over time
| (think sciatica). By the time I'm 60 in 25 years, it'd be great
| if we had that. No more need for opiates or drugs that barely
| make a dent.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_...
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| It's coming very, very soon. Verve just IPO'ed and you check
| out their S1 to see their data on using the exact same idea
| (N1mPs mRNA + gRNA inside LNP) to treat hypercholesterolemia!
| The data look amazing in non-human primates, which based on the
| Intellia data, suggest 10-fold lower dose in humans should work
| just fine.
|
| https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/verve-therapeutics...
| iandanforth wrote:
| That's amazing! How does one register as a potential patient
| for the trials?
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| www.clinicaltrials.gov once their IND is open, you'll be
| able to find it there! My guess is it's a year or so away
| before they start recruiting.
| foreigner wrote:
| This is awesome but I'm curious why they tried it first on this
| super-rare disease instead of something more common?
| SoftwareMaven wrote:
| Extremely rare diseases and diseases that have no known
| treatment options are given more lax rules for testing. Without
| that, there would be no way to develop treatments for them, but
| it comes with a side benefit of providing a method to attempt
| new treatment modalities.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| My 2 cents:
|
| a) need to edit liver cells only, not the entire organism, b)
| the disease is deadly, so the patients do not have much to lose
| if anything goes wrong.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Wild guess: it's because he's 65. Many of these severe genetic
| diseases kill their victims at relatively young ages.
|
| Ethical researchers are thus far being super-cautious about
| modifying the genome of someone who's likely to have children.
| While the article doesn't say, I wouldn't be surprised to learn
| that he has explicitly agreed not to have any (more?) children.
| hmmmhmmmhmmm wrote:
| Original paper:
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2107454?query=fe...
|
| This is the first published IV-administration of a gene-editing
| CRISPR payload. Interesting convergence with the nanoparticles
| used in mRNA vaccines. Sickle-cell and immune reprogramming edits
| have been made on cells removed from the body. Josiah Zayner
| infamously injected himself with CRISPR at a conference years
| back, but (1) unpublished, AFAIK and (2) he had been drinking
| which likely attenuated the payload [and (3) he wanted bigger
| muscles, not to treat a disease]
| gwern wrote:
| Mirror:
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/editing/2021-gillmore.pd...
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Stupid question: If he were to have kids, would they inherit this
| fix?
| Metacelsus wrote:
| No. Sperm would not be edited by this method.
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| Wow, it worked...This uses LNPs similar to the recent Moderna and
| BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines, and N1m-pseudouridine mRNA, just like
| the mRNA vaccines. This is incredible.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before we use this to cosmetically
| modify our bodies. I predict that at the very least we'll use
| this technic to change our hair color and eye color. I will even
| say skin color too, with-in the next 50 years.
|
| Most people won't use it but there will be an active market ,
| legal or illegal, for the modifications. The Sci-Fi future is
| here.
| pm90 wrote:
| On the contrary, I think most people will use it and those that
| don't will likely do so out of religious reasons.
|
| This is really great. Being born into the wrong set of genes
| seems like an incredibly silly thing to restrict humans to.
| Allowing humans to choose their appearance seems like it could
| resolve a bunch of psycho social issues and hopefully people
| can live more happy lives (although I am aware that these
| things often lead to as yet unknown problems of their own...)
| jtbayly wrote:
| You... might want to read the story of the Sneeches by Dr.
| Seuss.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Hair and eye color is bare minimum. You're gonna see cat girls
| and wolf boys and dragonkin and all kinds of weird ass shit.
| People making themselves intentionally disabled, people giving
| themselves a third arm, the sky's the limit!
| DudeInBasement wrote:
| Cool, we can only show stories where it worked
| carbocation wrote:
| Human clinical trials are pre-registered, in order to prevent
| exactly what you are describing (the 'file drawer problem').
| wesleywt wrote:
| Coming from a genetics background, I can tell you the fact that
| it worked once is a massive achievement in itself. This is
| science fiction.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I must be out of the loop. Last I heard trials with CRISPR were
| making not only the desired genetic changes but also dozens of
| others at random points in the genome. Did they solve that
| problem?
| dsign wrote:
| Humans improve technology all the time, CRISPR gene editing
| would be no exception.
|
| Straight from Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEAPER_gene_editing
|
| I bet a dip into the specialized papers will show a multitude
| of these techniques.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| The period missing from the title makes this very hard to parse
| what is being said.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Agreed. NPR never used to use clickbait titles like this ("He
| ..." is pure clickbait). It's sad to see them doing it
| regularly now. I imagine the latest generation of journalists
| grew up thinking this is normal. I know HN prefers original
| headlines, but I wish these would be edited down when posted
| here.
| mjfl wrote:
| "well then stop clicking on them!"
| caymanjim wrote:
| I often say the same thing myself. I expect it on CNN, and
| I do passively protest by ignoring links like this most of
| the time. NPR usually has good articles behind the links,
| and I'm more inclined to hold my nose and click if they
| make it to HN. In this case, the actual article is good.
| I'm lamenting the negative trend.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| Reminds me of this guy that cured himself of lactose intolerance.
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a17804128/sc...
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I think it's annoying people get upset that people who do this
| potentially damage their bodies. First of all, it's that
| individuals body. They can take whatever risks they want. I
| don't see how trying to alter your own DNA is any worse for you
| than skydiving. Both have inherent risks, none of which affect
| others. Secondly, because there is no red tape or ethical
| scientific practices required, this gives us the opportunity to
| study some anecdotal evidence and (hopefully) these people
| donate their bodies for research after death. We can't truly
| know these affects if we constantly just act so tepid about the
| procedures.
|
| Imagine if we had the scientific process about literally every
| aspect in human life since the dawn of civilization? We'd still
| be making bricks with straw, manure, sand, and water because
| there wasn't a government sponsored test of the quality of
| "Roman Cement" therefore we should not use it. Some of these
| people who criticize a lot of science do so just for the sake
| of disputing it. It's a good thing this stuff happens. The more
| anecdotal evidence we have, the more likely it can be subject
| to legitimate scrutiny and understand certain pitfalls that
| these individuals encountered and why. Just telling these
| people "you're stupid, it's bad for you!" is an ultimate waste
| of time and just stagnates data collection.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I think it's sometimes a gatekeeping behavior, instinctual
| and unconscious.
|
| If writing software required being a licensed engineer then
| you would without a doubt see reactions to open source,
| calling it deeply irresponsible and dangerous.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > Both have inherent risks, none of which affect others.
|
| If you make germline edits, this does potentially impact
| others - you can have children who inherit the edit. They
| don't have any choice about that (depending on the edit they
| might randomly not receive a copy of the edited material, but
| that's luck) and its consequences in them may be undesirable
| even if the outcome for you, an adult, was fine and anyway
| your choice.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| In the particular context of Though Emporium this wasn't
| going to happen. It used an adenovirus that couldn't
| reproduce so it was only going to alter a limited number of
| cells in his intestine.
|
| The technical requirements to this kind of limit the number
| of people that are going to really mess themselves up. I
| would be more worried about people accidentally releasing
| edited bacteria or viruses.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > releasing edited bacteria or viruses.
|
| From what I understand it's hard to order the sequences
| of DNA or RNA you'd need for this without someone
| noticing. It's probably not impossible, but not something
| anyone is going to bungle into.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| That's what is usually said. I don't think I've actually
| heard of this getting triggered. I'd like to think that
| global governments have this totally under control. Maybe
| the US does, but does China? In any case so far it's
| seemed like a whole "this rock keeps away Tigers" sort of
| thing.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think it more a result of companies that synthesize the
| raw material being unwilling to whip up things like SARS
| variants, and it being quite difficult to figure
| something out like that from scratch. That may change or
| turn out to be incorrect, this is just my understanding
| at the moment.
| stuntkite wrote:
| I am 100% pro bio hacking, I would go as far as to say
| that I think the bio hacking community might be the only
| place I can see solutions to our largest problems coming
| from. I mean the bio hacking community too, not acedemia.
| Not that acedamia isn't crucial to that process.
|
| Anyway, Maybe a few years ago the barrier to entry was
| too high for most people but that is so not the case
| anymore. Even just this year a friend sent me a link to a
| $2000 gizmo that was about the size of a pack of gum that
| could do desktop sequencing. Generating your own custom
| DNA in your bedroom is considerably harder (but not
| impossible) but it is not at all difficult to order a
| custom sequence from a half dozen different retailers.
| The file you send them is just a big chunk of a few
| letters. It's assembly code with no comments (yes I know
| folks do put in comments in text sometimes and sometimes
| biologically but just like always comments lie more than
| not), they functionally cannot be checking for what it
| could do if what you're working on is even remotely
| novel. For the price of a playstation you can have it
| delivered to your door next day air.
|
| There are very real risks here for our entire planet.
| Possibly one of our largest risks. To hide behind "it's
| too difficult for a malicious actor" is not helpful. I
| think genetic literacy is maybe the only thing we all can
| do as we might be entering very weird territory as a
| closed system that has a bent towards global narcissism
| and self harm.
|
| Something that gives me some comfort is that to be good
| at it you really have to do a gross and difficult deep
| dive into how all life works and I think there are very
| few people that could do that and still feel like it's ok
| to do harm at even a small scale. The things we are going
| to see in the next few years will be pretty fucking
| weird. I guess when you get down to this level, the only
| thing to have is something like faith. Eeeek.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I _think_ the key here is that you have to be doing
| something novel, which seems like a high bar. Like you
| can order the DNA for small pox. No one will fulfill
| that. But it does seem like a determined, over-educated
| would-be bioterrorist could pull this off with COTS
| equipment in the very near future, maybe.
| stuntkite wrote:
| Yeah, I guess if you just send them this specific genome
| for smallpox DNA[0] they might tell you to get lost. What
| I'm saying is that anyone who was awful like that would
| probably just go get a different disease in person.
| Historically people have managed that fine without having
| to learn version control. I mean, we have treatments for
| smallpox and a vaccine. My point being is that it's not
| useful to say "oh, it's too technical and I'm sure the
| DNA providers have some checks in place." I have never
| seen a god damned thing about what checks they are doing,
| and I'm nearly certain they are not that well regulated.
| I for sure know that there isn't a public accountability
| portal for these companies.
|
| What makes me feel alright is that I think to do some
| damage is not a technical or money issue but an issue
| with taking a dive on the closest thing we have to the
| meaning of life and I'd hope that that study would be the
| sort of thing that keeps someone from being the worst
| kind of monster. I mean, we have a ton of tools out there
| to be awful, why this?
|
| I guess what I'm saying is that to look at this set of
| problems and say "someone else probably has it handled"
| or assume anything we know is even slightly predictive of
| the future is silly. I think it's important for those
| that care to get an understanding of biology as we are
| now at an unprecedented point in existence where there's
| just not a way to feel too comfortable. Added benefit,
| the more people that get that understanding the closer we
| might get to yeast that eats plastic or mushrooms that
| make insulin.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1
| coryrc wrote:
| That is the line of reasoning that leads to banning
| abortions*. People have a right to alter their bodies.
|
| EDIT: and preventing young women from choosing
| sterilization.
| bobthechef wrote:
| How do you reason that people have the (presumably
| absolute) right to alter than bodies however they please?
| How do you justify that claim? It makes very specific
| assumptions which are very problematic. For example, do
| you have the right to lobotomize a perfectly healthy
| brain? It is immoral? Can you say you have the right to
| do something immoral? How about altering your uterus
| during pregnancy to prevent nutrients from feeding the
| child?
|
| I think it's pretty obvious that right implies morally
| acceptability. You can't claim to have a right to
| something evil. (The reverse is not true. It is morally
| acceptable to own a Tesla, but you don't have the right
| to one.) Alterations can be harmful and any harm that is
| not a justifiable side effect is by definition immoral.
| That it's your body does not somehow negate the
| immorality of self-harm. Indeed, direct self-harm is even
| worse morally than harm of others because it is in direct
| opposition to one's own good (arguably, harm of others is
| also a form of self-harm, specifically harm of one's
| character and will and habitus, of one's intellect
| because of the harm of one's reasoning faculties it
| entails, and harm of the common good). So you cannot say
| you have the right to self-harm. This is just a strange
| consequence of the incoherent ideology of absolute
| autonomy.
|
| Now, if you have, say, a defect in your body that is
| preventing the proper functioning of your body, then we
| may correct this defect through intervention. This is
| restorative, that is, it seeks to restore the function
| due to the body by virtue of how it ought to function.
| This is the basis of medicine.
|
| Another false view that can nudge people toward the view
| that any modification is acceptable is metaphysical
| materialism, also incoherent. In that case, crude
| metaphors between artifacts and living things are
| elevated to the status of the truth and since it doesn't
| matter what we do to an artifact per se. We can modify a
| computer any way we wish because there is no fact of the
| matter about what a computer is or how it should be apart
| from human intent. It is just a collection of things
| arranged in a particular way incidentally that puts them
| in a series of incidental causal relations, but there is
| no inherent tendency for these things to exist in these
| relations and no accounting for one in terms of the
| others except through the lens of human intent. Living
| things aren't like that.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _How do you reason that people have the (presumably
| absolute) right to alter than bodies however they please?
| How do you justify that claim?_ "
|
| If you couldn't gouge out your right eye and cast it from
| thee (Matthew 5:29), would you still have freedom of
| religion?
|
| > " _So you cannot say you have the right to self-harm.
| Now, if you have, say, a defect in your body that is
| preventing the proper functioning of your body, then we
| may correct this defect through intervention. This is
| restorative, that is, it seeks to restore the function
| due to the body by virtue of how it ought to function.
| This is the basis of medicine._ "
|
| What about vaccination and such where the intent is to
| cause a small amount of harm now, to prevent a problem
| you don't have - and may have never faced in any future.
| This is not restoring a defect, it's augmentative and
| preventative. Do you not have the right to cause that
| small harm? And yet that's in opposition to your "
| _direct self-harm is even worse morally than harm of
| others because it is in direct opposition to one 's own
| good_". It's in alignment with one's own good. So, for
| example, are the torn muscle fibres when weight lifting,
| or the buildup of lactic acid causing muscle burn when
| running, or working through the night with no sleep in an
| emergency.
|
| Less seriously, piercings for jewellery are self-harm and
| for one's greater happiness in appearance. Do people have
| no right to wear small pointy uncomfortable high-heel
| shoes? Is that immoral?
|
| > " _I think it 's pretty obvious that right implies
| morally acceptability._"
|
| I think it's pretty obvious that there isn't a single
| "moral acceptability" which everyone agrees on. For
| example some have the right to eat animals and others
| consider that morally inacceptable. Some US states have
| different rules on public nudity than others, and some
| groups of people have different opinions on the morality
| of it.
|
| > " _You can 't claim to have a right to something evil_"
|
| Not sure I follow this one; you can't really have a right
| to murder others, but in the sense of self-harm is it
| really "evil" to hurt yourself? What is evil and also
| doesn't involve harm to anyone else?
|
| > " _For example, do you have the right to lobotomize a
| perfectly healthy brain?_ "
|
| One could argue whether a "perfectly healthy" brain would
| choose to lobotomize itself, but let's say it does - why
| do you say that's "very problematic"? The main objection
| I have - assuming the person is considered sane and
| healthy - is who is going to pay for the care afterwards,
| i.e. the harm rolls over onto others and is not purely
| self-harm. If you could sign that away - it's basically a
| slow and horrible suicide method.
| Winsaucerer wrote:
| > I think it's pretty obvious that right implies morally
| acceptability. You can't claim to have a right to
| something evil.
|
| I think it's pretty obvious that right does NOT imply
| moral acceptability, and that you can have a right to
| something evil. In our societies, we have a great deal of
| disagreement about what things are morally
| acceptable/permissible. For a good liberal society, we
| may allow many things that we think are actually immoral,
| even evil. You need look no further than, say, the
| religious arena (including atheists) for such
| disagreement. People disagree about the moral
| acceptability of worshiping different gods (or about
| worshiping any 'gods'), calling someone an asshole,
| teaching your children one thing or another about sex,
| about engaging in particular sexual acts, about giving
| charity (or refraining from giving charity) to certain
| causes, and so on.
|
| We grant people rights to do certain things (and I'm glad
| we do), but that does not entail that those things are
| therefore morally acceptable/permissible. You have a
| right to do them, but maybe you ought not.
| coryrc wrote:
| If you don't have the right to your own body, then there
| aren't rights. It's the axiom.
|
| I'm in favor of drug use (at least almost all), tattoos,
| body modifications, trying experimental medicine,
| everything that affects your body. I can see drawing the
| line at "doing this thing could become a contagion so you
| can only do it in BSL-4 isolation". But it's your body,
| your life, you want to spend it stoned or a voluntary
| amputee or whatever so long as don't take from me, then
| you should be free to do so.
| refurb wrote:
| Exactly and why vaccines should never be mandatory.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Precisely. Otherwise if we're going to walk the line of
| "well even though it's your body, 'us smarter people' say
| it's bad for you there for you cannot do it" will
| inevitably lead to the logic of dictating abortion rights
| as well. This is exactly the logic conservatives use with
| the Covid Vaccines but because liberals "know what's good
| for everyone," people shouldn't be allowed to make the
| "my body my choice" when it comes to a vaccine.
| Regardless of who is more logically correct in the
| scenario, the current stance of American liberalism is
| "my body my choice" only applies in terms of abortion.
| Which conservatives when they get in power again, will
| utilize as rationale to make it illegal as many have been
| doing for the past decade.
| coryrc wrote:
| I didn't say you have the right to not alter your body,
| the public health requirements for contagious diseases
| seemed reasonable until people have started lumping gun
| control and "possibly altering your non-existent
| children"... maybe I'll one day feel as you do.
| coryrc wrote:
| And those restrictions should only apply to people in the
| public; if you choose to live off the land somewhere
| isolated, then those requirements should not apply to
| you.
| didibus wrote:
| It isn't about knowing what's best for you, but what's
| best for others. So where ethics come into play is when
| what you're seemingly doing to yourself could actually
| have impact on others as well.
|
| For abortion, you can claim it impacts others both ways,
| are you impacting a new born from having its life, or are
| you preventing a yet to be born child from having a
| troubled life, and saving family, parents and society its
| burden.
|
| For a vaccine, are you putting others at risk of a
| disease by not taking the vaccine?
|
| For bio-hacking, are you possibly creating dangerous
| virus or bacterias that could harm others, are you making
| modifications to yourself which will put a tole on the
| medical system if you later need assistance or special
| treatment if you mess up, etc.
|
| This is the same reasoning with drugs often, will your
| modified behavior cause harm to others if you consume
| them?
|
| Etc.
|
| None of this is black and white, but I think having these
| discussions on "what harm to others it can cause" is
| justified.
| bobthechef wrote:
| "Otherwise if we're going to walk the line of "well even
| though it's your body, 'us smarter people' say it's bad
| for you there for you cannot do it" will inevitably lead
| to the logic of dictating abortion rights as well."
|
| The first problem is that you are claiming that the
| child's body is the woman's body. It isn't and you know
| that. You know that is it an entirely distinct human
| being with it's own DNA, etc, etc. In order to justify
| abortion, you would need to argue that murder (which is
| the direct, intentional killing of an innocent human
| being) is justifiable. The logical consequences are
| devastating. For example, if murder of the most innocent,
| powerless, dependent, and vulnerable, by those with power
| over them no less, becomes justifable, then it becomes
| impossible to argue for the legitimacy any human rights
| whatsoever. You can't just make up moral principles out
| of thin air or assign arbitrary boundaries to them
| according to taste.
|
| The second problem is that this logic seems to put the
| cart before the horse. In other words, you've decided
| that abortion is a right axiomatically and you've decided
| to dismiss anything that would undermine that belief. But
| the moral acceptability of abortion is not axiomatic and
| must be judged according to prior moral principles.
|
| "This is exactly the logic conservatives use with the
| Covid Vaccines but because liberals "know what's good for
| everyone," people shouldn't be allowed to make the "my
| body my choice" when it comes to a vaccine."
|
| See my first point above. Here conservatives are indeed
| speaking of just their own bodies, so this is a false
| equivalence.
| coryrc wrote:
| "an entirely distinct human being with it's own DNA, etc"
|
| What makes us human beings is our personalities, our
| brains. Chop off my hand, I'm still me. Destroy my brain,
| I'm deceased regardless of how long you keep my other
| organs going.
|
| A fetus does not become human, IMO, until it can have a
| personality and sentience. Women have the power to create
| without consent of the created; the power to destroy
| their not-yet-human equally lacks the consent of the
| created. If the latter is prohibited than so should the
| former.
|
| From a societal view, we have enough people. Every way to
| support people consensually choosing to not have children
| should be encouraged.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _you know that is it an entirely distinct human
| being_ "
|
| You know that it _isn 't_ entirely distinct, it is inside
| and completely dependent upon another human.
|
| > " _In order to justify abortion, you would need to
| argue that murder (which is the direct, intentional
| killing of an innocent human being) is justifiable._ "
|
| How do you feel when a woman has a miscarriage? The child
| is dead, the mother's body deliberately killed it. Is she
| culpable? Is it different if her brain cells are involved
| in the rejection of the child? Isn't that you assigning
| arbitrary boundaries according to taste?
|
| There have to _be_ arbitrary boundaries, the universe is
| a single thing, the idea of there being separate things
| inside it is a human convenient fiction, it 's not real.
| The boundaries between things are fuzzy and disappear the
| closer you look at them. There's "just" atoms and energy,
| everything else is concept, if we want morals in the
| universe we have to make them up, and if we want them to
| apply to people, we have to make those up too.
| stuntkite wrote:
| His YouTube channel The Thought Emporium, is amazing. He just
| moved into a new lab and I really appreciate what he's working
| on and how he communicates it. The robot painting fluorescent
| proteins is neat and recently he dropped a video demonstrating
| his adventures making synthetic opal.
|
| Apparently the edit made him totally lactose tolerant for over
| a year and now he has very mild lactose intolerance. He says he
| hasn't redosed because he wants to improve the plasmid (I think
| that's the right term, BUGFIX probably isn't right) before he
| takes another run at it.
|
| Here's his update video from last year on that endeavor.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoczYXJeMY4
| faitswulff wrote:
| Technically a plasmid is kind of like a software patch, but
| generally they're employed by bacteria and not eukaryotes
| like humans.
| stuntkite wrote:
| Interesting. I have watched nearly all of The Thought
| Emporium's videos (so clearly I'm an expert, lol) and I
| think he uses the term plasmid to describe DNA he's working
| on in the crazy bio IDE he uses. I think in this instance
| he applied it to a yeast that he cultured and put into
| pills and swallowed.
|
| He really is doing some neat stuff though. He's inspired me
| to do some small bio hacking experiments and it ALMOST
| makes me want to go back to college.
| shpongled wrote:
| Plasmid is the correct term!
| stuntkite wrote:
| I am not being sarcastic when I say thank you for
| confirming that. If someone didn't confirm it it would
| pop back in my head for days, "maaan, you fucked it up
| and now some other nerds are gonna use the term wrong and
| that's really not helping anyone." heh. Cheers. :)
| jcims wrote:
| Here's his YouTube channel:
| https://youtube.com/c/thethoughtemporium
|
| Amazing and alarming what a smart and dedicated person can do
| with limited funds.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| That's really cool, thanks for sharing! I just watched his
| video on the WiFi camera and I loved his presentation style
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I recently watched the two videos on this (that I'm aware of)
| and it's the first time gene therapy didn't strike me as
| macabre Frankensteinian experiments on vulnerable people who
| will say "yes" to all kinds of crazy stuff out of desperation.
|
| Cystic fibrosis significantly impacts gut function and many
| people with it do poorly with dairy products. I could see this
| and/or some variation of this being valuable therapy for the CF
| community while we wait for better answers.
|
| Although best known as a deadly lung disorder, the impact on
| gut function is a major problem that just gets less press but
| is something people with CF and their loved ones fret about a
| whole lot. I think if you could do something to improve gut
| function fairly quickly and semi permanently, you would likely
| reduce a lot of their other issues as well because people with
| CF are typically underweight, sometimes severely underweight,
| and their chronic malnourishment is a major underlying source
| of their inability to fight off infection.
| ohbleek wrote:
| CFTR modulators have completely transformed CF treatment for
| +90% of patients. Gene therapy is a possibility, however,
| with there being +1000 possible mutations that can lead to
| CF, it's not the clear cut candidate that some of the other
| rare genetic disorders are right now. The cynic in me also
| thinks that with CFTR modulators costing ~350k/year, drug
| companies may not feel incentivized to run the risky gene
| therapy trials and patients may not want to participate given
| the dramatic improvement in their lives with current therapy
| options.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| That honestly doesn't fit with my understanding of how
| life, the universe and everything works. I did some
| searching and this source says that 85 percent of people
| with CF have at least one F508del mutation:
|
| https://pediatricsnationwide.org/2019/11/25/a-major-
| mileston...
|
| And this source agrees with your statement:
|
| _The triple therapy, known as Trikafta, could effectively
| treat 90% of people with cystic fibrosis._
|
| https://pediatricsnationwide.org/2019/11/25/a-major-
| mileston...
|
| When I was on CF lists, I was hearing that the first drug
| in this class that had recently come out only helped five
| percent of people with CF (I was specifically hearing that
| it helped people who were double F508del and that was only
| five percent of all CF patients, IIRC) at a cost of at
| least $250k annually, so "if you can afford it or live in a
| country that covers that for you."
|
| I was also hearing people say that some of the stats were
| dummied up and exaggerated because so much money was at
| stake.
|
| I left all the CF lists years ago. The figures I'm seeing
| today don't fit with what's in my head and I don't know how
| to sort out what's true and what's PR nonsense and it
| doesn't really matter to me personally. I and my son with
| CF are both off all drugs and have lived on very little
| money for years.
|
| Good for them. I'm sure this makes me even more irrelevant,
| "crazy" and stupid in the eyes of the world than I was
| already. Which is no big deal. I don't really care. I'm
| just leaving this comment because I asked you for a
| citation and then found my own and deleted my comment.
|
| I don't want people to think I'm being a weasel or
| anything. The articles I'm finding seem to agree with you.
| I don't know what to make of that and it's not really
| relevant to my life. I will never have the money for these
| drugs and don't really care.
|
| Have a good day.
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > it's the first time gene therapy didn't strike me as
| macabre Frankensteinian experiments on vulnerable people
|
| That's because it has barely begun to become viable IRL while
| science fiction writers have been using it as a convenient
| punching bag for decades -- without ever stopping to ask if
| they should.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| No, that's because I have a form of cystic fibrosis and I
| know what I and others like me have been willing to do in
| the face of that and because I'm aware of real world
| experiments done on people who were seen as _less than
| human_ for some reason, such as the Tuskegee syphilis
| experiments done on Black Americans and horrifying
| experiments done on people in concentration camps in Nazi
| Germany.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
|
| https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-
| medic...
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| This is insane. I love it and it terrifies me at the same time.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Wow...this is a really big deal. Congratulations to this team and
| to the patients who were treated. I hope the treatment continues
| to keep the disease at bay.
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